DC’s superhero team-up film Justice League unites Batman, Wonder Woman, and new heroes onscreen. With relative ease, they overcome their different backgrounds and come together to save the world from an evil galactic overlord and his army of flying demons.

And that’s pretty much the story in full.

Justice League’s simple structure and quick pace may please more audiences than the first two installments of this DC film series, the often-maligned Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Both films strove to explore several meta-themes on a popular philosophical level; they sought to bring into the story-worlds themselves the very conversations fans share about superheroes, such as the reasons people reject or embrace Superman or compare him with Jesus Christ. But in place of these grander ideas, Justice League instead presents several fun characters with smaller journeys of their own—though its lightness loses some of the earlier films’ dramatic weight.

Officially, Justice League shares those films’ director, Zack Snyder. Few aspects of Snyder’s hallmark style actually feature in the final product, however. In his previous films, Snyder favored a “tear-down-and-rebuild” approach in which minimalist, struggling protagonists bulk up, confront critics, scream loud, and punch hard in the dark to become heroic in a world that doesn’t always respond favorably to them.

Many critics and fans, however, didn’t respond favorably: While some viewers argued that these stories’ darker worlds present greater moral challenges for their heroes …